NANA

I'm normally not a great fan of manga or anime, but this film adaptation of the manga NANA is one of my favourite Japanese films. (I love のだめカンタービレ too but only the tv series.)

The movie came out in 2005, and I remember watching it (with Chinese subtitles) with my Mum at a cinema somewhere in HK (the summer holiday after GCSEs). And then my Mum bought me the DVD, and I watched it with my roommate Sarah at school. The TV at school couldn't display the Japanese subtitles, nevertheless we watched it together, despite the fact that we had only studied Japanese for about 6 months! Sarah is a big fan of the manga, and she had been reading it for a while (in English) as it's published in a manga magazine in the States. So even though we could only understand a tiny bit of the dialogues, we knew the story quite well.

Maybe now I can watch it and understand the entire film fully for the first time?



Apart from the friendship of the two main characters (奈々 and ナナ), the other main theme is the music - songs such as "Glamorous Sky", "Journey", and "Endless Story" are quite memorable. And the performances by 中島美嘉 (who plays ナナ, vocalist of the fictional band Blackstones) and 伊藤由奈 (who plays the vocalist for another band, Trapnest) are pretty good too.

Right now "Endless Story" is my song-of-the-moment. Yes it's a ballad but I love the lyrics, simple yet precisely describes my thoughts right now...